Results tagged “Kantō Jigoku”

As of RIGHT NOW, all my books are back in stock! Tokyo Inferno, The Four-Day Weekend and Summerworld all have signed copies and are immediately available. All books are $20 + $3 domestic S/H.

Due to a screwup on my part, the PayPal "Buy Now" buttons that I had on this site were not rendering correctly. I've re-implemented how they show up, so they should appear correctly now. Click on any of the above links to go to a page where the proper "Buy Now" button appears.

(If you still have trouble finding anything or making it work, holler at me in the comments and I'll fix it.)

Been wanting to get your hands on Tokyo Inferno? Read the first three chapters free in PDF format, or on Scribd.

(Once again, I'll have actual printed copies available for sale once I get back next week.)

And so Tokyo Inferno is done and off to the printer's. At last!

I won't be making the book available from the website just yet — I want to get all that settled after I get back from AnimeFest 2009, which is where the book's big premiere will be held. Look for it there, or catch up with me after I'm back home and no longer passed out on the ground.

Also, in the coming year, I'll probably be moving to CreateSpace for all of my publishing needs. Less costly, more options, better distribution systems. I have to set up an account with them and see what the results are like, all of which takes time — and I'd rather do all that when I'm a little less blown out and able to better assess the results.

I'm also planning on creating merchandise (shirts, etc.) based on the cover art for Summerworld and Inferno. The former, especially: everyone I've talked to loves the idea of having the Bowman With A Machine Gun on a shirt. And so it shall be, as soon as I can find a way to do that without getting crap quality or breaking the bank.

Tokyo Inferno is now as done as it gets! That is, at least until I get some word back from my selected proofreaders and editors. Once I have texts back from them, I'll be able to post my usual teaser chapters for public consumption. Budget permitting, I'll have those available as ashcans at AnimeFest (although, of course, the digital versions are free).

Also to come this week: final cover designs and other muckamucks.

Editing on Tokyo Inferno is moving at a decent clip, all things considered. I'm about 2/5ths of the way through the first (cleanup) pass; then I hope by before the weekend I can do the actual logic/plotting pass. And then I'll pack it up and give it to my Crack Proofreading Squad, you all know who you are (I hope).

I already have the internal layout about 90% of the way there, so that's not a problem. Ditto the cover design — the biggest issue there will be calculating spine width and whatnot, but I have templates for such things already prepped and ready.

My absolute drop-dead day to send this thing to the printer is August 26th. That gives me roughly a week and change to get it out to the people who need to read it, receive any fixes to be made, implement them, and put the last bits of spit'n'polish on the document.

And after that ... well, that's the subject of the next post.

The first draft of Tokyo Inferno is finished, at just over 100,000 words. Now comes the hard part: getting it hammered into shape and taking delivery of the finished product before AnimeFest. If I edit about five chapters a day, that means I can get a first pass done by around Thursday of next week. Odds are I can do more than that on the weekends. But I'll need at least 2-3 passes — one for mechanics, one for logistics, and one more for general read-through.

And after this is done and out there, I'm thinking I'll take the rest of the year off.

Sometime in the coming year I may end up getting back to work on a project I never finished. Tentatively titled Vajra, it was my NaNo project for 2007; it fell short of the needed word count for the month and I ended up shelving it and turning attention to other things. But once it's finished and retitled, it'll be the third book I've written, more or less in a row, that deals with a kind of "Tokyo of mystery" or "enchanted Tokyo".

The first one you already know well: Summerworld. (And if you don't know about it, then by all means educate yourselves.) The second is currently being written: Tokyo Inferno. I hadn't been consciously trying to create a trilogy — past, present, future (sort of) — but that's what came out.

To that end, I'm thinking of bundling all three of them into one volume when they're done — or, at the very least, selling all three together as a single $30 set (perhaps as a convention-only special). The three are linked by many other things other than locale, so it only makes sense. This would be a long way off, of course, but it's something I find myself coming back to as a nice way to wrap up the package with a bow.

Tokyo Inferno has a slightly remodeled cover design!

The old design, for reference:

Tokyo Inferno is now just south of 40K words. It “feels” about a little less than halfway done, so it’ll probably come in at 100K proper — about the length I’ve been aiming for with most of my work.

A couple of conventions ago when I was sitting in on a panel about writing, someone popped the question: how long should a story be? My own answer to this was something like “Where’s the ‘should’?” Meaning that you always want to look into what’s compelling you to make the thing the length you feel is right. I don’t have a particular ambition to write anything the size of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, if only because I’m pretty sure anything I would have to say would be long exhausted before I ever got to even the 500 page mark, let alone the 900 or 1,085 or however many pages that elephantine thing is.

On the other hand, I have the worst time with short stories. I cannot pull off anything that compressed — or, rather, I haven’t been able to do that since I left high school. Back then I was able to throw down a story a week or so for class, but a) that was high school and b) I was not turning out anything I’d want to unearth and parade around now. What few ideas I feel are worth dwelling on at all typically get turned into long-form pieces because that’s where I feel like I’m getting the most for my effort.

There are some shorter pieces that are probably worth polishing and anthologizing at some point. Two come to mind: “A Review Of The International Anthology of Android Literature, 2nd Edition [Revised]” and “Shunga-Satori”. The former’s a story in the form of a book review (think one of Dale Peck’s self-professed hatchet jobs); the latter’s one of those pieces that wanders around freely between psychological horror and straight fiction and confessional epistolary writing and who knows what else. I’d probably want to pack them together with a third or maybe even a fourth item in one volume and add that to the catalog. No title yet save maybe for Shunga-Satori and Other Stories, or something equally unassuming.

People who can bang out short stories are like the folks who can tie cherry stems in a knot with their tongue. It’s such a little thing, but damn, dude, the fact that you can do it at all is monumental.

I've reached the point on Tokyo Inferno where my edits are now caught up with where I left off with the manuscript back when I was still writing it (for NaNoWriMo). I'd decided to stop and backtrack, and do some more research, before diving in and writing the rest of it.

Good news about the research is that most of what I ended up reading turned out to square with my original guesses. At the same time, I wanted to have that many more details to draw on, even if they're just starting points to spiral outwards from.

I'm now about a third of the way through the manuscript — if not by raw word-count then certainly by plot markers. Now that the basics of the story have been mapped out, the rest is (I hope) smoother sailing; all I have to do is put my head down and write my thousand or so words a day and the rest should fill itself in quite naturally.

No, I didn't see Watchmen this weekend — but I will, honest! What's interesting is how the fans of the book are not as enthused about it as most other people — something I suspect will even out as time goes by. Something of the same thing happened with Blade Runner, if memory serves: those who'd read Sheep were irritated at how little the movie resembled the book, but once people got over that they were able to appreciate how they were as similar as they were different.

After what I can only describe as some horribly tedious rock climbing I managed to get past the rewrite that had been bugging me in Tokyo Inferno. It wasn’t even all that big a section — maybe a thousand words, tops — but how to do it and how to rewrite the character in question were the two big killers. It was the endless stop-and-start nature of the whole thing that was deadly, like trying to pull a car out of an icebank when you have no handy cardboard, cat litter, tire chains, tow trucks or UFOs with tractor beams to get you through.

From here on out it should be slightly smoother sailing, with my projected date for a completed first-draft manuscript sometime around the end of April or so. That’ll give me a good 3-4 months time to clean it up, prep the presentation, and create some promotional material. (In the works: a series of “blurb” postcards with eye-grabbing first sentences from the books they promote, instead of just images. Should be interesting to see how those go down when I spread ‘em around.)

I've made the needed corrections to Summerworld and The Four-Day Weekend for their new 5.5 × 8.5 trim size editions. The changes were minor but there were a lot of them, collectively: a misaligned spine image here, some typographical inconsistencies there, and so on. But the resulting product has been really heartening. I love the new publisher-grade paper, and the print quality of the cover is if anything even better than before.

I don't know how many copies of each I'll be bringing with me to WickedFaire this year, but I ought to be able to start soliciting orders for the new editions by the end of this week. Once that happens, the old editions will be phased out and you'll be directed towards the new ones exclusively. Those of you who bought an earlier edition, you now have a collector's item!

Sadly, Lulu doesn't yet offer ISBN distribution for this new trim size, but once that happens I will be making everything available through all the most popular channels (Amazon, etc.). Once that happens, I'll have all the more incentive to start reissuing the older books — Casual Users, Another Worldly Device and maybe one or two other things — in that format.

The single hardest part about this whole thing has been making sure everything is consistent. Having templates and style sheets and the like is a big boon, but after a certain point you have to start tweaking everything manually for each individual product. That's where, I suspect, people with dozens of different books begin to go a little nuts. (Of course, in a more conventional publishing house, they don't have to keep every single one of those things in print at once — that's probably a big boon for them, not having to worry about the way things look across every single title in their library.)

I'm also impressed at how much of this stuff I've been able to do with software that costs nothing. The cover layout and typesetting: Scribus. The vector art: Inkscape. The two big proprietary apps I'm still using are Photoshop and Word, but only because everything I've found to try and replace them hasn't really worked out well for me. OpenOffice isn't bad, but I already bought and paid for a copy of Word 2007, and dang it all, I like Word 2007. Maybe I'll try producing the next book with OpenOffice, but for now Word it is.

My long-term plan has been to produce and offer about one book a year, and at this rate I have enough current and future projects to keep me going for a long time:

• Tokyo Inferno, 2009
• Vajra / The Mapmaker / other as-yet-undetermined title, 2010
• Four-Day Weekend sequel, 2011
• The Destroyed Room, 2012 (oh noez, end of teh worldz!!1)
• Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope, TBD (my stab at horror-comedy, and yes the title is a lift from the Agoraphobic Nosebleed album)
• The as-yet-untitled "hero story", TBD
• Four-Day Weekend pt. 3, TBD (I need to visit Japan before I can even think about beginning this one)

Time for some book news!

I'm looking to have them fully-baked by this time next week or so, since I'll be off at Comic-Con by then and will be trying to get people interested in them whenever possible.

Similar editions of the older books will follow, but right now my efforts are going to be directed towards getting Tokyo Inferno done. I have more research to do than I originally realized, but that'll make for all the better a finished product.

My tentative project for 2010 is to finish Vajra, my incomplete 2007 NaNoWriMo effort — which I suspect will get a name-change first, although I'm still mushing around trying to figure out what a good name for the story would be.

The other 2010 possibility is Dreaming Out Loud, the tentative (very tentative) sequel to 4DW. The rough plan is to have it be for RPGs what 4DW was for convention-going, but I don't have a lot nailed down other than that general concept yet. There also may be a third installment — wherein the gang goes to Japan — but that ain't happening until I go to Japan and can write about it firsthand.

I haven't posted for a bit about what's happening with the new novel, Tokyo Inferno. I ought to, since I now have more good news than I can shake a fistful of sticks at. The story's back on track — and better yet, it's reached a milestone for its internal structure.

For a long time the exact questions at the heart of the story eluded me. Now, this past morning, it all snapped together.

For the sake of those who know nothing about the project yet, I've put the discussion behind a jump and placed it behind a "spoiler" block (you have to hover the mouse over it to see it).

I took a little time today to figure out what the roadmap is for Tokyo Inferno from here on out, now that NaNoWriMo is officially over. Here's what I have so far.

• December: Time off. I need it badly, especially after the year I've had.
• First half of January: Re-reading what I have so far and re-assessing it in the light of some of the things I've been thinking about.
• Second half of January: Rewriting any existing text to bring it in line with changes to the plan.
• Feb.-Mar: Completing first draft.
• April-May-June: Editing and doing second draft.
• July: Finish and perform layout and composition.
• August: To printer so that it can be made available at AnimeFest '09.

Some of what I had in mind shifted during the course of writing it — new ideas suggested themselves, while old ones retreated heavily. A few of you reading this (and I think you know who you are) might get drafted into the service of helping me pull this beast together. It's rather lumpy right now, but not irreparably so.

My original impulse is just to follow what I have in mind right now all the way through to the end and see where it takes me, and then beat on it later if need be. If it means postponing the results until next year, so be it; I'd rather have this right than early.

I've got bad news, but maybe it's actually good news in disguise.

The bad news is simple: It doesn't look like I'm going to get to 50,000 words by the end of November. I gave it a good college try, and I'll still be writing something during the long weekend, but hitting the 50K mark by that deadline is strictly off the table.

It wasn't just that I fell behind. I'm genuinely exhausted, and it's the kind of exhaustion that crept up on me and invaded my bones and blood while I was convincing myself it was just "laziness". I'd dealt with back-to-back conventions, friends visiting, a surprising amount of work (both the kind that provides a paycheck and otherwise), family obligations, and that stupid ATI "driver stopped responding" error. Throw NaNo on top of that and you have a recipe for do-it-yourself anemia.

How any of this is good news is disguise is hard to fathom, I suspect. Well, it means I've given myself that much more permission to take it easy for the rest of the year. I have a good idea for how Tokyo Inferno is to be written and wrapped, and I don't need to have it done and put to bed until this coming August. Heck, if I get lucky, I can wrap that and then maybe go back to work on the project that was NaNo '07 (which remains unfinished, and more annoyingly, untitled).

On the first day of NaNoWriMo 2008, I racked up a nice, solid 2,143 words for Tokyo Inferno. My initial hesitancies about how difficult it was going to be and whether or not I would get mired down in topical details have more or less melted away. It's a first draft, and getting to the finish line / rounding all the bases / [insert metaphor here] matters most right now.

I'm gunning for a total length of about 120,000 words or so, although I don't mind it coming in a little shorter than that. I'm more concerned with making sure the right tone and substance are all present. So far, they are there, and all the ingredients are obediently lining up and allowing themselves to be made present.

Now if the @#$%&* NNWM website would just let me log in and post an update ... (Yet another argument for cloud-base hosting. Between hard drives dying and the power in their data center going out, I'm expecting an eighteen-wheeler to come crashing through the wall of the hosting center and grind the server into tinfoil.)

Update: I'll have the most recent word counts posted via Twitter.

The first draft for the cover image for Tokyo Inferno is live. Check it out...

Cover images, BTW, are by Heiwa4126@Flickr, and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

I spent most of the last two days highballing NyQuil and wishing I didn't feel like red-hot pokers were being shoved into my eyesockets. That's right — Con Crud (or Con Staph, ha ha), which is rather surprising since I felt more than fine after I left, followed pretty scrupulous self-sanitization measures, and haven't gotten a case of serious consickness since about 2003 or so.

So I dosed myself, and slept — or tried to — and was plunged into a fever nightmare the likes of which I hadn't experienced in a long time. The good news is that fever dreams are, for me, usually a source of inspiration.

The dream was set in Japan's Taishō Era — sort of the Roaring Twenties of Japan, but also suffused with a heavy dose of dread and deathly decadence. Kawabata's novel The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and Edogawa Rampo's detective thriller The Black Lizard both do a great job of encapsulating the aroma and flavor of the era — the former in a more literary way, and the latter in the guise of pulp fiction.

My dream, though, revolved around a young man who was caught in the Kantō Earthquake and finds himself curiously "unstuck in time". He journeys to the past before the devastation of the quake, and finds comfort there in things he remembers, but that comfort soon turns out to be short-lived — everything that was familiar and happy there quickly turns strange and terrible. He returns to the present, but there finds himself pursued by hellish apparitions bent on consuming his soul. He finds some shelter with a spirit medium, but even she isn't able to help him. The only answer lies in the future ...

... and if I start talking about how all that works out, I'll ruin one of the best reasons to read it when I finish writing it. Which, by my best estimates, will probably start sometime in, oh, November. Hint, hint.

One key thing is the look and feel of the whole work, which is hard to put into words. My closest point of comparison would be the art of Suehiro Maruo — he of the phantasmagorically evil Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show, the brilliant if also vile Ultra-Gash Inferno, and many others that will probably never see print in the U.S. at this rate. His nostalgia for the Taishō-era look and feel comes through in all of his works — even the ones that are allegedly set in the present day — and so does an all-pervading sense of unease, something else I want to capture in this thing when i write it.

I even have a tentative title: 関東地獄 Kantō Jigoku, or Tokyo Inferno. Kantō is the Eastern part of Japan that contains Tokyo, and there is a certain cachet associated with using that word, although in English "Tokyo" carries more of a meaning than "Kantō", sadly. Hence the substitution.

I'll be tagging posts about this and setting up a separate category for it before long.